A Fine Read
Martha Payne's Put Him In Coach is a fine read. Though a memoir, it has the pacing and dramatic tension of a novel. The reader feels the mother¿s pain every time son Sam strikes out, pops up, or, especially, gets bombed off the mound. With every incident where Sam fails to meet his mother¿s expectations, we rise and fall with him. We feel Martha Payne¿s maternal pain. Throughout the memoir she seems bent on painting herself as a bit of the bad mother because she so much to be the mother of an All-Star. Readers, I think, will applaud her tireless efforts to support her son and his teammates, and will probably overlook, or forgive, the couple of times when her zeal pushes her too far, and perhaps she is guilty of wanting her son to succeed to fulfill her wishes more than his. But to be fair, wanting one¿s son to succeed, even if it brings a mother or a father a large measure of pride, can hardly be looked at ad a grievous fault. We want our kids to be heroes. This book¿s not just for baseball moms, but for all of us out here trying to do the right thing for our kids, and maybe ourselves. Besides the fun of the reading this tale, there are lessons to be learned from Martha Payne¿s book. One can¿t ask for more.
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Overview
Four-year-old Sam Payne can knock the baseball out of the park. That “the park” is only the back yard of his suburban home makes little difference to his mother, Martha Payne, who understands baseball a lot better than she understands parenting. She yearns to make her son a star on the Little League field, where promising young players are rewarded with a spot on the All-Star team.Fueled by endless ambition but only a pinch of maternal instinct, Payne helps her son navigate through the thrilling but often heartless world of Little League baseball. While revealing a host of parental neuroses and coaching excesses, Put Him In, Coach! delves into the inscrutable bond between mother and ...